Poems are language turned into art sound and sense matter they can be as long or longer than The Odyssey or as short or shorter than a haiku. Not very helpful.

All of the arts are kin - music and sculpture and dance, those are wordless art forms. But poetry is defined by language. Of course, each art is distinct, and has its own character - not just in terms of media, but in terms of what seems to lie at the heart of it.

Our lives are so dominated by financial concerns - paying the rent - and consumer choices - what sort of detergent to buy at Costco - that larger issues get subsumed into economic ones. Not just social justice, but basic issues of faith and meaning.

It's not surprising to me that books ended up playing a central role in my life, but it is somewhat mysterious that poetry did.

Poetry resonates differently in each culture it doesn't in America.

People who publish poetry today do it from a sense that poetry needs to be published, not because they think they are going to make money.

Many other cultures value poetry more than we do. In Ireland, poetry is a top cultural pursuit, the art to end all arts.

The shape that poems make in the mind is an echo of something powerful in the cosmos. I do believe that, and that is certainly irrational, so perhaps I am no wiser than Elizabeth Perkins as to the nature of poetry.

The culture stays alive, but certain parts of it die or fail, and that's very interesting to me.

I tend to write poetry that is rich in data of various sorts. The lyric poem isn't perfectly suited to accommodating such data, so I've had to find new ways to say everything that I want to say.